The Sleeper Gaming PC Build!

- Don't try this at home. Well, I don't think that... That doesn't seem right. (laughs) Too bad. So today we have a challenge. Our wonderful sponsor, Micro Center, has given us the new AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT early, which means we have less than 24 hours to

build

a great

gaming

PC, test it, and publish this video. Should be easy, right? I want to look great. - That's a lot of 212. (Austin laughs) Dude, they actually cost 35 dollars. Actually, it's a good deal. Did you make measurements? - Oh, absolutely not. Not even a little bit. - How ambitious do you want to be? - I mean, with this video, it should be posted tomorrow.

No, wait! Ah, I just realized. What if we get a power supply with RGB? (laughs) Wait, this has RGB? Wait, this doesn't have RGB, right? - No. - Oh. - You just assumed. - I did it, I saw R- Look, I see ROG, I immediately assume RGB. I mean Kratos actually seems to be cool, right? He better look this cool, okay? Well, they have the black and white Vengeance Pro. So let's go with a white motherboard. So we can show off that white Vengeance Pro. Our goal today is simple. (plastic creak) We need to

build

an entire

gaming

PC around this.

The Red Devil PowerColor Radeon RX 6700 XT. Now, this is intended to be a competitor to something like an RTX 3070, which means... Although yes, in theory, we should build a very simple and straightforward system. Instead, we're doing this. Inside this box is a system that appeared 20 years ago. You have to lift with your back. Don't lift with your knees, lift with your back. One two three. (foam crunch) So, this... is a computer I actually used to have. I actually made a video about this system, back in 2010. We're going to take it apart and reuse this chassis. So we have a

sleeper

(whisper foam) on the outside.

Complete with our Windows XP and Pentium 4. But inside, we're going to have an absolutely over the top gaming PC for 2021. Now, this system was purchased on eBay for parts. Although it is in fairly good condition, I believe it is missing a hard drive and some other components. So don't worry. We are not ruining an ancient work of art. (laughs) Oh, look at this. We have the original specifications of the system. Pentium 4 processor, half a gig of RAM and 80 gigabyte hard drive. Oh! Oh, wow! That's so clean. Oh no, we can't ruin this. This is really cute.

Look how clean everything is. This wasn't supposed to work, but I see that it's simply missing a hard drive. Now, one of the interesting things about this chassis was that if you really pressed this bottom part, it was a little spindle like for your CDs. As for aesthetics, I really want this to look as authentic as possible on the outside. I don't want anyone to realize that we have a modern gaming PC. The biggest problem is going to be where are we going to put the cables? If you look at the front, we have our DVD, our CD and everything.

I don't want to have to remove them, but we won't have room for cables if we keep the units complete. - You could probably take these units out and just keep the faceplates. - I'm really sorry for the lack of time we have to work on this. Well, we just have to start taking it apart. (upbeat music) Okay. So, we have almost everything else except the optical drives and we have a good amount of space here. So my first test, before we even continue, can I put our mATX board inside? Check it out. Perfect. It's funny how so many things have evolved and changed and yet so many things remain exactly the same.

Well, that's very good news. When was the time you saw a graphics card that didn't even need a heatsink? I'm wondering, do you think I could mine Ethereum with this? One of the main problems will be cable management. You can't run cables from behind, right? I mean, this is it. We can't hide anything. All of our cables will come from the power supply. They will have to go somewhere and be defeated. We'll have to take out those optical drives, right? Because the idea here really is, from the outside, totally dormant. From the inside, as soon as you remove the side panel, it's RGB city.

Basically, what we really want. We only want this front piece to go on the front of the chassis (plastic jingles), but then we can keep the rest of the space for cable management. - Yes, the main problem (the hum of the machine) is that all this is still plastic in the front. So I don't want to rip anything. - In the meantime, I have the Ryzen 5 5600X installed, which is really good to see 5th generation Ryzen starting to become available regularly. We also have our 16 gigs of Corsair Vengeance RGB, which looks so sick in white. Below here, we have our 970 two terabyte Samsung EVO drive.

Well, so progress has been made. First of all, the front of the chassis looks the same. However, when you return, you will see that the units are now completely missing. So, Ken did a great job of gluing all of that into place and ripping apart this old CD and DVD drive. For my part, I already have the board ready. Now we have our X570 board, but we also have our memory. We have our SSD and I installed our 212 with a pair of Corsair LL120s. A bit exaggerated but it must be taken into account. These two are... not only the CPU fans but also the main system case fans.

We have that little 80k fan, which I think will fit in the back of the chassis. But yeah, there won't be much airflow, as we should put it. (upbeat music) Do you know what the Red Devil cards are known for? Its performance. Do you know why they are not known? Be small. I should have thought of this before. (laughs out loud) Not even close. I think we can remove these drive cages. In fact, I think that might be okay. Oh, look at that. Am I tripping? Or are there no confrontations about it? However, I don't think they are founded.

Does it seem like a bad idea not to use confrontations? Remember when I got really excited (whisper plastic) to find RGB in the power supply. Do you know what I forgot to look for? It is modular. It looks pretty cool from this side, right? Never mind the fact that now we have to find a way to manage all this via cable (laughs) on the side. Wow, that's not even close. Don't try this at home. Always use all the screws (machine hum) on your power supply. Sometimes when we're shooting a video, I have a kind of sneaking suspicion.

There's like some silly music playing right now. And it is the beginning of the failed assembly. So let's go to the back of our system. You'll see there's a little space here at the bottom of the supply. This is known as additional cooling. This was all part of my plan. (laughs) Too bad. (inhales) My main concern is, first of all, will it look decent? Why do we go through all this trouble if it seems like garbage? And second, are we going to overheat the system? In this case there isn't much airflow, right? Even with a couple of extra fans on the CPU cooler.

I mean, there's just not much airflow here. We will need all the help we can use in this system. Because you know something more than I'm realizing. There is no intake anywhere. How do I get enough airflow for my entire system through this small, narrow series of slots? I went from being completely confident to thinking, "Oh, this isn't bad enough to like, there's no cooling in the system." Although I think we should try. Well, while installing the motherboard, a new problem arose. So if you take a look at our 212, which should fit the vast majority of cases, you'll get down to ground level.

I think these little caps will barely stop us from putting the side panel on. (gasps) It works, wait, does it fit? (PC parts rattle) How does that fit? Like it doesn't really fit very well, but... Oh! Phew! Man, this is going to be, for an old chassis, absolutely packed with hardware. (laughs) That's disgustingly full of PC hardware. - Although it actually looks very good. - It's almost like we planned it and I didn't buy this chassis on eBay. And then, we YOLOed it today without any backup plan. We clearly thought about this. Now comes the fun part.

Trying not to make it seem like it, Wall-E vomited inside. - So, I'm trying to connect the power button that originally came with the case to the board. And I'm not exactly doing the best job. I would probably even say that this maybe poses a fire hazard. (Austin laughs) I don't... probably not. It should be OK. Okay, so Austin plugged in the power supply and... (metal sounds softly) - Sad guys. Yeah, you know, it would be helpful if I actually activated this power. - Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. (Austin laughing) No, no, no, no, no. (click change) - Well, I don't think that...

That doesn't seem right. I think your wires might be touching there. (laughs) The thing is, we have about two hours left to install this with Windows and run games and benchmarks. - I know, but I'm stubborn and I want this to turn out well. - It is fine, me too. Oh hello! I didn't see you there. I was browsing the website of our excellent sponsor, Micro Center, when they happened to be having a big promotion going on right now. Where you can get for free, not only a 32 gig micro SD card, but also a flash drive.

Look how simple it is. Enter your email address. Show up at the store. It's a free coupon in store. I mean (laughs) it's hard to beat a deal like free. Sorry, I was distracted by the excellent and wonderful offer from our kind Micro Center sponsors. I get distracted easily, it's okay. Behind me, you'll see a 100% original, unmodified Compaq Presario from 2001. Look, it has Nvidia graphics. That is a lie. It has an Intel Pentium 4 processor and Windows XP, it also lies. But if you come to this side, you will see that there is a little secret lurking inside.

Not only do you have a bit of red glow at the bottom, but especially if you look back, it looks straight up evil. It doesn't look good like that. It looks like it's on fire. Which I can assure you, it's not on fire yet. Now, Ken and I have been building it for seven hours straight today? Yes, yes, we have done it. Do we need a last second BIOS update even though I previously used a 5th generation Ryzen processor on this board? Just because. Yes we did it. Did we have to take everything apart (teapot whistle) and spend an hour troubleshooting?

UH Huh! Guess what? Everything works. What we did was make it as clean as possible (machine humming) while still delivering that sweet 2001 aesthetic. So here it is my friends. (Click on PC parts) Our manual work. Now yes, yes, yes. Everyone is screaming. "Oh, look at the wires!" "Oh, it's disgusting." But keep in mind that just a few hours ago, this was a mostly functional Windows XP system and we've changed virtually every component. This is the first time we have been able to test this card, as it will be out in less than 12 hours. So although yes, you can check out JayzTwoCents or Linus Tech Tips for all the benchmarks that have probably already been published.

The main thing we're going to do today is see how well it works inside an incredibly thermally limited chassis. But if you get closer, what you can see is that there is still almost no airflow inside this chassis. It's actually not that loud. So yeah, the graphics card is still not doing anything. So (laughs) as soon as we started emphasizing it. But I'm actually quite happy with this. And the most important thing is that the power button works. With the old original. It was good, but there are certainly some telltale signs that it wasn't entirely legit.

But not only was it an iconic PC, they sold a lot of them. But besides that, we have all the original stickers in very good condition. But inside, I mean, this is a legit gaming PC. First, we have a quick 3DMark Time Spy comparison test. While you shouldn't build a system in a chassis like this with very, very little cooling, these parts are really power efficient. If you look at that Ryzen 5 5600X, it's a pretty low power CPU with still a lot of performance. Which is part of the reason we can run this. And I have nothing for input besides this little grill on the bottom and my power supply that I can turn up to maximum fan.

And that's my escape. So- And the result is ten thousand nine hundred and eighteen. We are certainly a little below the 370, but considering that we are using a Ryzen 5 and not a high-end processor. We're certainly losing some of that in the CPU score. Alright, let's see how it actually works in a real Black Ops game. So we have the ability to run this game with Ray Tracing enabled. Now, like all other AMD cards of this generation of the 6000 series. The ray tracing performance is not surprising. The good thing about this card is that it has a full 12 gigs of VRAM.

Yes, with Ray Tracing enabled. This game looks great, but we're dropping to about 60 FPS and that's at 1080P. I mean, I don't want to say that 60 FPS is bad, but I guarantee it isWe deactivate Ray Tracing, we will go up a lot. However, I have to say that this is actually a good benchmark for the card. Because look at that, we're seeing over 9 gigabytes of VRAM being used. I'm very happy with how this build turned out, but of course, if you liked it, be sure to subscribe to the channel and ring that bell. Check out our great sponsor, Micro Center, at the link in the description.

And if you've built a gaming PC recently, you can submit your build in the Micro Center Build Showcase with #MicroCenterMadness, to be entered to win one of two Micro Center prize packs. Submissions will be available until March 26, and a bracketed community vote will begin the following week, limited to the grand prize winner. Until next time, I'm thinking of building (PC part clicking) a 2001 Compaq Presario. See you then.